Who We Are
Poets have long played a central role in movements for social change. Today, at a critical juncture in our country’s history, poetry that gives voice to the voiceless, names the unnamable, and speaks directly from the individual and collective conscience is more important than ever. The festival will explore and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for change: reaching across differences, considering personal and social responsibility, asserting the centrality of the right to free speech, bearing witness to the diversity and complexity of human experience through language, imagining a better world.
Faced with war in Iraq and elsewhere, our country faces a crisis of imagination. Most Americans agree that we need dramatic change: to end the war, reorder our national priorities to meet human needs, save our planet. How we address these challenges is a question not just for policy makers and strategists. It is a question for all of us. We believe that poets have a unique role to play in social movements as innovators, visionaries, truth tellers, and restorers of language.
Poetry and the arts are also vital to youth development and empowering young people to speak out and have confidence in their voices. Our intention is to bridge differences in our city and literary community: to place on the same stage poets who work primarily on the page and poets who write primarily for performance; gay and straight poets; African American, Latino, Asian, white, and Native poets; young poets and older poets; poets with disabilities; poets of all social classes.
Split This Rock believes that as citizens and artists, our obligation has never been greater. Our intent is twofold: To call poets to a greater role in public life and to bring the vital, important, challenging poetry of witness that is being written by American poets today to a larger and more diverse audience.
The goals of Split This Rock are:
- To celebrate the poetry of witness and provocation being written, published, and performed in the United States today.
- To call poets to a greater role in public life and to equip them with the tools they need to be effective advocates in their communities and in the nation.
Co-Directors
Sarah Browning is Co-Director of Split This Rock Poetry Project and DC Poets Against the War. She is the author of Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works, 2007) and co-editor of D.C. Poets Against the War: An Anthology (Argonne House Press, 2004). The recipient of an artist fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, she has also received a Creative Communities Initiative grant and the People Before Profits Poetry Prize. Browning has worked as a community organizer in Boston public housing and as a political organizer for reproductive rights, gay rights, and electoral reform, and against poverty, South African apartheid, and U.S. militarism. She was founding director of Amherst Writers & Artists Institute -- creative writing workshops for low-income women and youth -- and Assistant Director of The Fund for Women Artists, an organization supporting socially-engaged art by women. She has written essays and interviewed poets and artists for a variety of publications.
Melissa Tuckey is Co-Director of Split This Rock and a Coordinator for DC Poets Against the War. She is author of Rope as Witness, a chapbook published by Puddinghouse Press (2007), and her poems have been widely published in literary journals. She’s recipient of artist fellowship grants from DC Commission on Arts and the Humanities and Ohio Arts Council. Tuckey has a background in community organizing and organizational development. From 1993-1996, she worked as Development Director and Environmental Justice Project Organizer for Kentucky Environmental Foundation, the lead organization of an international coalition of citizens’ groups working for safe disposal of the chemical weapons stored in their communities. In this position, in addition to fundraising responsibilities, she led an international exchange between United States and Russian activists, assisted with community organizing in affected communities, and helped member organizations with board development. She has a MA in English Literature from Ohio University (1999) and an MFA in Creative Writing (poetry) from George Mason University. She has taught literature and writing courses at Ohio University, Hocking College, University of Maryland, and George Mason University.
Board of Directors
Regie Cabico is the Director of the Split This Rock’s World & Me youth poetry contest and Artistic Director for Sol & Soul. Cabico is a poet, playwright, and spoken word performer. He took top prizes at the 1993, 1994, and 1997 National Poetry Slams. His work appears in over 30 anthologies and he co-edited Poetry Nation: A North American Anthology of Fusion Poetry. He received a NYFA Artist Fellowship for Poetry in 1997, NYFAs in 2003 for Poetry and Performance Art, and two Brooklyn Arts Council Poetry Awards. Cabico has been a teacher for Urban Word and developed a poetry and performance program for teens with psychiatric illness at Bellevue Hospital. He received the 2006 Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers in recognition of his work with diverse communities.
Noura Erakat, Acting Chair, is a Palestinian-American activist and lawyer. Based in DC, she is presently working on domestic policy in a Congressional subcommittee. rior to attending law school, she helped launch the divestment campaign along with the Students for Justice in Palestine at UC Berkeley. Noura continues to help build the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement across U.S-based university campuses and communities in an effort to end Israeli Apartheid. While at the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, she developed an Anti-Apartheid Framework Training Curriculum. In addition to activism, Noura is also a cultural worker. Her works include numerous poems published in Mizna, Cipatli, the Incite Anthology as well as two theater pieces. Her revolving monologue Pulse of the Intifada which was based on oral histories she collected from the West Bank in the first month of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, was selected as Al-Phan’s 2003 play of the year. Her monologue Visiting Palestine was selected by Incite: Women of Color Against Violence to be a part of its national tour, SisterFire. She also produced a radio documentary, “We Refuse to Forget: Commemorating the 20-year Anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila Massacre” which was nominated for the Golden Reel 2002 award for Best Local Documentary. Most recently she was a visiting scholar at Georgetown where she examined the political bias influencing cases involving the Arab-Israeli conflict in U.S. federal courts. Noura has spoken at college campuses, in churches, and community centers nationally. She has also appeared on national and international television programs including Al Jazeera International, MSNBC, HBO’s “Politically Incorrect” and Fox’s “The O’Reilly Factor.”
Jaime Lee Jarvis, Secretary, is a writer/editor who has worked with Split This Rock since 2007. She was the volunteer coordinator for the first Split This Rock Poetry Festival in 2008, and now provides interim administrative/communications support. Ms. Jarvis holds a master’s degree in technical and professional writing and has almost 10 years of experience in proposal development, writing and editing, web-based communications, and information management. Currently a proposal/grant writer for an international nonprofit organization, she also has been a literacy tutor, a Peace Corps volunteer and secondary school teacher, and a corporate librarian. A poet and environmental activist, she works quietly to raise awareness about more sustainable living in her DC and Northern Virginia networks.
Micheline Klagsbrun studied in Paris with Alfredo Echeverria and at the Corcoran with Bill Newman. She has exhibited widely, and is in private collections nationally as well as in Europe and the Middle East. Recent solo and group exhibits in Washington D.C. include gallery plan b, Studio Gallery, Exhibit9 Gallery, the Embassy of Finland and the Corcoran Gallery of Art; elsewhere, Macy Gallery (New York City), Aswan, Egypt and Delhi, India. She is co-founder and President of CrossCurrents Foundation (founded in 2006) which as part of its mission sponsors art to promote social justice. The current project is BrushFire, a national series of public art projects in the run-up to the Fall '08 elections that use the arts to heighten public engagement with key social issues, culminating in September 2008 with an exhibition at the Katzen Arts Center at American University. This exhibition featured prominent artists and documented the public art projects that BrushFire is presenting nationally. http://signalfire.provisionslibrary.org.
Klagsbrun has a background as a Clinical Psychologist (Tavistock Institute, London: G.W.U. Medical Center). For many years she co-chaired the Forum for the Psychoanalytic Study of Film (now the Forum on Media and the Mind), co-edited their journal “Projections” and chaired a seminar on Psychoanalysis and Film (the Forum on Psychiatry and the Humanities: Washington School of Psychiatry).
Bob LaVallee, Treasurer, is a Senior Program Associate with The Finance Project. He is a program manager and technical assistance provider with more than 15 years of nonprofit management experience. Mr. LaVallee was the Director of Community and School-Based Initiatives for DotWell in Dorchester MA. He also was Director of Finance and Operations for City On A Hill Charter Public High School and the Acting Director of Operations for the Institute of Contemporary Art, both in Boston, MA. In these roles Mr. LaVallee developed a deep knowledge of nonprofit financial practices and how they interface with mission-driven organizations. He is the author, with Kate Sandel, of Beyond the Checkbook: A Financial Management Guide for Leaders of Small Youth-Serving Organizations (2009). He holds a Master of Business Administration with a concentration in Non-Profit Management from Boston University and a Bachelor of Science in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University.
E. Ethelbert Miller is a literary activist. He is a board member of The Writer’s Center and editor of Poet Lore magazine. The author of several collections of poems, his last book How We Sleep On The Nights We Don’t Make Love (Curbstone Press, 2004) was an Independent Publisher Award Finalist. Miller received the 1995 O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize. He was awarded in 1996 an honorary doctorate of literature from Emory & Henry College. In 2003 his memoir Fathering Words: The Making of An African American Writer (St. Martin’s Press, 2000), was selected by DC WE READ for its one book, one city program sponsored by the D.C. Public Libraries. In 2004 Miller was awarded a Fulbright to visit Israel. Poets & Writers presented him with the 2007 Barnes & Noble/ Writers for Writers Award. In 2009 Curbstone Press will publish On Saturdays I Santana With You. In 2009 Miller also released The 5th Inning, a second memoir. Mr. Miller is often heard on National Public Radio.
Anas (“Andy”) Shallal is an Iraqi-American artist, activist, and businessman, owner of Busboys and Poets. He is a Foreign Policy in Focus Analyst, board member of the Institute for Policy Studies, and a spokesperson for Education for Peace in Iraq Center. He is the co-founder of The Peace Café, which promotes Arab and Jewish dialogue and improved understanding. He is the recipient of the Fairfax County Human Rights Award; the Jefferson Medal, the highest honor for volunteerism in the United States; and the United Nations Human Rights Community Award.